Here's some I made earlier: the year so far in cakes

I do actually make cake more often than I write about them, because I am bad at remembering to write up my cakes. So here's a few I've made and forgotten to write about.
Start with the Christmas Cake. Okay that was really last year but I did forget to write about it!
Here in Ireland there is a bank holiday at the end of October, and I wanted to make my Christmas cake early so it could mature a bit so I decided to make it then.
The maturing didn't really work because I forgot to feed the cake but anyway I decorated it and we ate quite a lot of it (though not much got eaten on Christmas day on account of us eating too much dinner!)
Here it is:

Cake!

Closer look at the top

I decided to do a blue cake with bells and stars on it. Some of the silver dust went everywhere and the blue colouring stay on my hands for a few days but you get the general idea.

It took a while to get through the Christmas cake and all the mince pies so I didn't do much more baking till the end of January, when there was another Magic tournament to make cake for - the Gatecrash Prerelease. This cake was quite similar to the one I made in September for Return to Ravnica, except that the guild symbols were different. I don't have a picture of the finished cake, but here's one of the guild symbols all together:

 And some close ups of each guild symbol:

Boros - Red and White

Orzhov - White and Black

Dimir - Black and Blue

Simic - Blue and Green

Gruul - Green and Red

February is birthday month so I made a ginger cake (again I forgot to take a picture!)
The recipe is from one of my mum's recipe books and it's super tasty so here goes:
Ingredients
1/4 pint (150ml) milk 
1 teaspoon (5ml)bicarbonate of soda 
4 oz (100g) butter 
4 oz (100g) golden syrup 
4 oz (100g) treacle 
3 oz (75g) soft brown sugar 
1 tablespoon (15ml) orange marmalade 
4 oz (100g) self-raising flour 
4 oz (100g) wholemeal flour 
1 teaspoon (5ml) mixed spice 
2 teaspoons (10ml) ground ginger 
2 small eggs, beaten 

(Instead of the wholemeal flour you can substitute 8 oz SR flour if you don't have wholemeal)

Method
Grease and line an 8 inch (20cm) round or 7 inch (18cm) square cake tin. Pour the milk into a saucepan, add the bicarbonate of soda and heat gently until tepid. Place the butter, syrup, treacle, sugar and marmalade in another saucepan and heat gently, stirring until the ingredients are combined and the sugar dissolved. Place the flours, mixed spice,ginger and a pinch of salt in a bowl and mix together thoroughly. Stir the treacle mixture into the dry ingredients, then add the warmed milk and beat well to a smooth batter. Beat in the eggs. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake in a warm oven (160°C or 325°F or Gas mark 3) for 1 hour or until a fine skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Allow to cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely and remove the greaseproof paper.

Helpful notes from my mum on the method:
I mix the dry stuff first, then start the treacle mixture on the stove, then do the milk last so it doesn't go cold - it only needs to be slightly warm, you can test with your finger. You don't want it getting too hot as not only would it take ages to cool down but would probably do something dramatic to the bicarb! The mixture will be very runny (pretty much liquid) when you pour it into the tin. I leave the greaseproof paper round to keep it in shape until it was quite cold. I remember it was quite difficult to get a good shape and sometimes the sides of cake were bit funny where there were folds of greaseproof. But it needs to be all one piece of greaseproof (i.e. not separate sides & base) otherwise runny mixture will go through gaps when you pour it in. If you've got a silicone cake tin or cake tin shaped baking parchment liners that would be much better.

As for March baking, I covered most of that in my post at Easter.

April comes round, and another Magic cake to bake - this one for the Dragon's Maze Prerelease.
I spent a while thinking about making a cake with a maze on top, but in the end I made a cake with a dragon on instead.Apparently people were disappointed that it was fruit cake. Admittedly it was a bit dry (I was using gluten free flour which apparently needs more liquid than wheat flour) but I like fruit cake normally.

Red dragons are the best kind!

In May I didn't get much baking done so here's some pictures of striking bus drivers stopping me (and the rest of Irish commuters) from getting to work:

Walking picket line

There should be buses here!

The departure screens at the bus station lying about whether there would be buses

However that all got sorted out eventually (hooray) so now it is June and I made some more Magic cakes as there were more tournaments.
First of all I made a 'colour pie' for the five colours that there are in Magic.This is based on the fruit tarts you get in french patisseries (except I used a flan case instead of making a pastry one). I got the creme patissiere recipe from Nish Bakes blog. The creme patissiere is not too hard to make as long as you don't stop whisking until it's done! Mine was a bit runny in the end so perhaps I took it off the heat too soon.

Clockwise from top: green kiwi fruit, white banana, blackberries, red strawberries, and blueberries.

Then I made a chocolate cake as I'd been asked for one. I made my chocolate earl grey tea cake which i first made two years ago, and I iced it with buttercream and decorated it with mini marshmallows :

Marshmallows form the planeswalker symbol (again from Magic)

Oh and in case you didn't have enough pictures already, here are some of my friends baking cupcakes at my house. Well, eating cupcakes we had just baked.

Tasty cakes get eaten fast!

Very excited to have cakes!

Unhealthy oranges - 15/10/12

So the tale begins a couple of weekends ago, when I was in Kinsale with family. We happened to go into a chocolate shop called Koko, and someone nice bought me chocolate covered orange slices.
 As we were exchanging mooney for tasty chocolate, the man in the shop said 'I've just crystallised those oranges the other day, so they're nice and fresh'

And I ate the chocolate orange slices, and they were tasty, and I fancied some more, only I don't go to Kinsale very often.
So I thought, 'maybe I could crystallise some orange slices? Sure it's only sugar'
I found some useful instructions on this blog post on how to crystallise the oranges.
(The conversion I used gave 1.5 cups water to be 350ml, half a cup granulated sugar to be 95g. Those amounts are for one orange but you'd probably only want to do one orange at a time unless you owned a chocolate shop!)

And so I bought an orange, some tasty chocolate and some sugar and had a go.

The water & sugar took longer to come to the boil than I thought, and I probably should have used a flatter frying pan rather than a big saucepan to make it easier to turn the slices over, but here are some tasty sugary orange slices after they've cooled:

The house smells of oranges!

They are very sticky

 Then today (I crystallised the oranges yesterday) I melted some tasty Green & Black's Maya Gold (which already is orangey & spicy & tasty) and dipped the oranges in it, then dipped them in sugar to stop them being so sticky.

One tasty chocolate orange slice

Lots of tasty chocolate orange slices

 So here is how to make oranges unhealthy! Just add 100g sugar, 350ml water, and about 70g chocolate. Hopefully they're as tasty as I think they will be.

16/9/12 - A cake with a name

A while ago my friends had a baby, and I made them a quilt as a present. Well now the baby is a bit bigger (she's still very small though!), they were having a baby-welcoming party (like a baby shower, but after the birth) Obviously they've already had their present, but I was asked to make a tasty cake so I made a cake with the baby's name on it. It's a chocolate cake similar to the birthday cake I made in August, but with raspberry jam instead of cherry for the sandwich-joining.
For some reason the cake rose very unevenly in the oven but i managed to fill in the dips with jam and chocolate icing. The small lumpy bits on the icing are where I didn't quite melt the chocolate in the ganache because my cream wasn't hot enough. Ah well.

The flowers are chocolate floodwork, similar to the floodwork flowers I made here but made out of melted white and milk chocolate instead of runny icing. The white chocolate for the outlining went a bit lumpy so some of the flowers were not very good - these are the best ones! The milk chocolate melted much better so filling the flowers was easier than the outlines. I kept the flowers in the fridge until I was ready to attach them to the cake, so they wouldn't melt.
The name is iced directly onto the cake, I practised a couple of times on greasproof paper to get the letters the right size and I made small marks in the icing with a skewer to keep the writing even (the marks were covered up by the writing)

Cakes for a birthday party - 11/8/12

 You may have noticed that I like baking with my friends. One of those friends is Esther, who has her own recipe blog at 'La Recette du Misther' (as long as you can read french!)
So for her birthday she decided to have an afternoon tea party, and asked me to bake a cake.

Well I looked through my recipe books, and couldn't decide which cake to make so I baked three:

Chocolate cherry cake, bara brith, lemon cheesecake

They're actually three cakes I haven't baked before! They're all Good Food magazine recipes so I can post links for you.
The chocolate cherry cake is a variation on the chocolate raspberry cake I made for a friend's birthday last year (here) - I just replaced the raspberries with cherries. (original recipe here)

E is for Esther!

The lemon cheesecake (recipe here) is quite similar to a vanilla cheesecake I made around christmas time, though that had chocolate digestives as a base instead of plain, and white chocolate grated into the cheesy bit instead of lemons. I accidentally bought two lemons and a lime instead of three lemons, so it's technically a lemon & lime cheesecake. I found citrus flavoured sprinkles in the shop and couldn't resist them to decorate it!

Tasty cheesecake!

 Finally the bara brith (recipe here).My previous attempts at bara brith involved yeast and went terribly wrong, but this one has self-raising flour instead so it's basically a more interesting tea loaf.

Lovely sugary bara brith

It has sugar crystals on top of it for added crunchy tooth rotting goodness!

So I made toomuch cake, there's lots left. Oh well!

House cake for a house warming - 24/9/11

My friends moved to a new flat recently, so i made them a cake for their house warming party. I decided to make a chocolate cake because I already had all the ingredients (and also chocolate cake is tasty!) so I made a loaf cake because the recipe for that is quite simple. Then I cut the top of the cake where it had risen to make a steeper roof, and coated the cake with chocolate ganache.
The doors and windows are made out of fondant icing because I didn't think to get any white chocolate for them!

Front of the house

Back & side of the house

The chimney is a piece of cake and the roof has mini marshmallows along it.

The ganache is quite simple to make:
100ml double cream
150g dark chocolate, broken/chopped into small squares (or dark chocolate chips)

Chop up the chocolate and place in a bowl
Bring the cream to the boil in a saucepan
Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and stir until it is smooth.
If the cream does not melt all the chocolate, you can melt the mixture over a pan of boiling water like normal chocolate, but the cream should be hot enough to melt it all on its own if you pour it over straight away.

The cake is a recipe for a two pound loaf tin, I made it in a tin 20cm by 10cm (8 inches by 4 inches). The ganache will cover a cake this big quite easily.

Chocolate raspberry torte - 28/4/11

Another chocolate cake, baked for a friend's birthday. This is another recipe from Good Food magazine (here), though I used less of the raspberry filling than they suggested.
The main problem with this cake is that it wants two cakes baked in 9inch tins, and I only have one tin. I simply baked the cakes one at a time, but trying to line a hot tin with baking paper led to a slightly odd shaped cake! Fortunately these things are easily covered up with icing. Perhaps next time I should just cook it as one cake, and slice in half afterwards, though this would make a different texture as the cake is supposed to be still gooey on the inside after baking.

Un-iced chocolate cake - 4/4/11

Today I was meeting some friends for lunch, and they asked me to bring pudding. So I made chocolate cake. This was a new recipe which I had found in Good Food Magazine, available here. It is very gooey and lovely. It uses ground almonds instead of flour so it's even gluten free! The recipe says it takes twenty minutes to prepare but it took me more like 40 minutes. I forgot to take any pictures before we ate most of it but here are some of what is left.

A quarter of it left.

You can see the gooey centre.

It was baked in a 9 inch diameter round springform tin, and dusted with icing sugar on the top.